ForgetMeNot
by TheArc5
Summary: How could they forget something so important?  One vision of Rose's life in the AU.


They tell me I've forgotten.

"Sarah Jane!" I say, appalled. "How could you forget? You told me to call, if I needed to. We blew up a school with K-9, how could you possibly forget that?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Mum," she says, bewildered and beginning to cry. "Who's K-9?"

"Ask Mickey," I tell her, getting frustrated at this nonsense. Mum, indeed! She's the older one!

"But Mum," she says, crying harder, "you've forgotten. Uncle Mickey's dead."

She leaves soon after that because I won't talk to her anymore. How could she forget?

_They called Mickey the luckiest squad leader of Torchwood. He never lost a man and he never left a mission unfinished. But one day, they brought him home in a body bag, and they didn't call him lucky anymore._

Jack is just as bad, but I think I know why.

"Maybe these are your two lost years," I suggest. "You look so young. Maybe you haven't even met me yet. Non-linear timelines and all that. You should ask the Doctor. He'll be hiding from Mum, I expect."

"Maybe so, Mum," he says. He leaves before I can ask him why he's calling me Mum, too.

_A year after you left, Dad sent me red roses and a note. It was the first time he said he loved me, and after that, I called him Dad instead of Pete. Even though he sent me roses every year, I still have that note. I read it over and over again. There aren't any more roses, now that he's gone, but I kept that note._

_I don't think Mum had the strength to go on after Dad died. The baby...you remember, I told you about the baby... It was a miscarriage. Dad kind of kept her together after that. She'd gotten so used to handling things on her own, it was a bit of a shock, having someone there to prop her up. When that was taken from her... Well, she didn't last six months. The doctors couldn't explain it, but I knew: she couldn't bear to live life without him twice._

"James?" I ask when he comes to visit. "When can I go home?"

"It's me, Mum. Timothy."

"Don't be silly, James, Timothy is our son's name. Take me home. Please?"

He doesn't answer me, just holds my hand.

_I met James while I was studying for my doctorate in astrophysics. (It was a lot easier than I thought it would be; I guess some of the stuff you said stuck.) James was studying literature, and he used to sit beside me in the library and shake his head at my notes. Then, he'd write me little poems about how silly and pointless math was. We didn't even talk until our first date; we just communicated on those little scraps of paper, passed between us on the table._

"I want to go home!" I insist. I may be old, but I'm still their mother. Why won't they listen to me? Why do they keep treating me like I'm crazy?

"You can't, Mum. You have to stay here, where the doctors can look after you," Timothy says soothingly.

"Nonsense," I scoff, pushing his hands away. "The TARDIS has much better equipment than this, and the Doctor certainly knows how to take care of me. Let me go home!"

"What's a TARDIS?" Sarah whispers to Jack. He shakes his head.

"I don't know."

He's forgotten.

_I told him I couldn't marry him. He asked me why, and I told him. I told him everything: the alternate universe, about meeting you, about the war. I told him about Norway, and how I loved you and always would. I told him I was half a person, with you gone._

_He smiled at me, and told me that he'd been married before. His wife was killed in a zeppelin crash six months after the wedding, and he was studying literature because that's what she loved best. He said that she had been his reason for getting up in the morning._

_"But if you're half a person, and I'm half a person, together we make one whole person, right? You're the mathematician."_

_So I married him. And he was right; slowly, bit by bit, we began to put our lives together. It still hurt, but it was easier with two. We made each other whole again by being together._

_A year after we were married, he told me he loved me. I loved him back._

Where are you? I keep looking and looking, but I can't find you.

No one knows I'm gone. It's cold out, and snowing, just like that Christmas right after you changed. You were there to hold my hand, then. Where are you now?

Please tell me you haven't forgotten me. You come for me, you always come for me, no matter how far off I wander...

I haven't forgotten you. I remember. I'll find you, just you wait, and we'll go to the stars and back. Remember? Saving planets and crawling down ventilation shafts and eating the best chips in the universe.

Remember us, together, just like it should be?

Remember me?

Remember?


End file.
